Nine-and-a-half years ago, I finished law school, without incurring any student loan debt. Two-and-a-half years ago, with the clarifying distance allowed for by the passage of time, I started chronicling the strategies I used (and a few I subsequently learned). My manuscript became Your Debt-Free JD: How to Graduate from Law School Without Incurring Student Loan Debt.
When the book was nearly complete, I sent out a flurry of proposals to small publishing companies. I talked to a couple of literary agents. Really thought I actually had a deal with Carolina Academic Press, and was just waiting to sign the paperwork, before I got a disappointing call to let me know things had fallen through.
It was always a small target market. Total JD enrollment has gone up since then, but when I was first pitching my book, there were only about 37,000 students starting their 1L year in law schools across America. Presumably, people who do not intend to go to law school would not be interested in reading a book about how to go to law school without incurring student loan debt. Even within the general category of “law students,” the core strategy described in the book — in a nutshell, courting a full law school scholarship and largely ignoring the U.S. News rankings — is workable for only a small subset of people at the fortunate intersection of “talent” and “open-mindedness.”
So, while I was disappointed, I understood publishers’ reluctance. Eventually, though, I realized I was falling victim to one of the very things I warn against in the book: irrationally enslaving oneself to traditional measures of prestige that have very little to do with real world outcomes in the twenty-first century. It is prestigious to be the author of a book published by a respected publisher. But at the end of the day, I didn’t write Your Debt-Free JD to feel better about myself. I wrote it to help people, particularly those coming into the legal profession without any previous exposure to it. I have a soft spot for those folks, having been one of them when I started law school.
With my signature bad timing, I published Your Debt-Free JD as an e-book on Amazon on February 29, 2020. It was a simpler time, when pretty much only Bob Woodward, President Donald Trump, and a few lucky senators knew that coronavirus was going to be a big deal. Despite the bad timing, demand for tangible paper-and-ink copies of Your Debt-Free JD was so high that I set up a paperback version a little over a month after the Kindle edition hit the virtual shelves. Following an initial spike when I first wrote about Your Debt-Free JD in this column, sales remained slow but steady, until reaching a pretty cool milestone at the end of last week.
Your Debt-Free JD has now officially sold 100 copies. That’s hardly enough to reach bestseller status, but that is a whole lot of people who hopefully gained valuable insight into what they are facing in terms of law school debt. Apparently, some readers found the book useful — my thanks to those who helped it reach a reasonably respectable 4.1-star rating on Amazon.
Although I didn’t write Your Debt-Free JD to feel better about myself, I kind of do, when I hear from readers who got something out of it. Send me an email if you’ve read the book and have any thoughts you’d like to share. Better yet, if you liked it, communicate that to me with a five-star review on Amazon, which will make it easier for other people to find and benefit from the book. Hell, if you leave a five-star review I’ll even talk your law school decision-making process over with you on a call, or at lunch next time I’m in your city if this pandemic ever ends.
And hey, thanks to everyone who already bought a copy of Your Debt-Free JD. Tell your friends. Remember, it makes a great gift for Christmas, Hanukkah, or whatever occasion you’re celebrating. Your Debt-Free JD is also a nice little surprise apropos of nothing for that special heathen in your life (atheists particularly appreciate a little attention this time of year). Happy holidays, everyone.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.